The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  A corner of my failing brain prompted me to wonder about the source of the silvery “moonlight,” for this now glinted from frost which was gathering already over the frame of the Time-Car. If the moon was verdant still, she could not be the source of this elfish glow. What, then?

  With the last of my strength I twisted my head. And there, in the starless sky far above me, was a glowing disc: a shimmering, gossamer thing, as if spun from spider-web, a dozen times the size of the full moon.

  And, behind the Time-Car, standing patiently on the plain of ice -

  I could not make it out; I wondered if my eyes were indeed failing. It was a pyramidal form, about the height of a man, but its lines were blurred, as if with endless, insectile motion.

  “Are you alive?” — I wanted to ask this ugly vision. But my throat was closed up, my voice frozen out of me, and I could ask no more questions.

  The blackness closed around me, and the cold receded at last.

  [BOOK FIVE]

  White Earth

  [1]

  Confinement

  I opened my eyes — or rather, I had the sensation that my eye lids were lifted back, or perhaps cut away. My vision was cloudy, my view of the world refracted; I wondered if my eyeballs were iced over — perhaps even frozen through. I stared up into a random point in the dark, starless sky; at the periphery of my vision I saw a trace of green — perhaps the moon? — but I could not turn to see.

  I was not breathing. That is easy to record, but it is hard to convey the ferocity of that realization! I felt as if I had been lifted out of my body; there was none of that mechanical business — the clatter of breath and heart, the million tiny aches of muscles and membranes — which makes up, all but unnoticed, the surface of our human lives. It was as if my whole being, all of my identity, had become compressed into that open, staring, fixed gaze.

  I should have been frightened, I thought; I should have been struggling for another breath, as if drowning. But no such urgency struck me: I felt sleepy, dream-like, as if I had been etherized.

  It was that lack of terror, I think, which convinced me I was dead.

  Now a shape moved over me, interposing itself between my line of sight and the empty sky. It was roughly pyramidal, its edges indistinct; it was like a mountain, all in shadow, looming over me.

  I recognized this apparition, of course: it was the thing which had stood before me, as we lay exposed on the Ice. Now this machine — for such I thought it must be — swept towards me. It moved with an odd, flowing motion; if you think of how the sand in a glass timer might shift in a composite movement of grains if you tilt the device, you will have something of the effect. I saw, at the corner of my vision, how the blurred edge of the machine’s skirt swept over my chest and stomach. Then I felt a series of prickles — tiny jabs — across my chest and belly.

  Thus, sensation had returned! — and with the suddenness of a rifle shot. There was a soft scraping against the skin of my chest, as if cloth were being cut away and pulled back. And now the prickles grew deeper; it was as if tiny, insectile palps were reaching below my flesh, infesting me. I felt pain — a million tiny needle-jabs, burrowing into my gut.

  So much for Death — so much for Discorporeality! And with the realization of my continued existence came the return of Fear — instantly, and in a great flood of spurting chemicals which swilled around inside me with great intensity.

  Now the looming shadow of the mountain-creature, blurred and ominous, crept further along my body, in the direction of my head. Soon I should be smothered! I wanted to scream — but I could feel nothing of my mouth and lips and neck.

  I had never, in all my travels, felt so helpless as in that moment. I felt splayed out, like a frog on a dissecting table.

  In the last moment, I felt something move over my hand. I could feel an etiolated cold there, a brush of hair: it was Nebogipfel’s hand, holding mine. I wondered if he were lying beside me, even now, as this ghastly vivisection proceeded. I tried to enclose his fingers, but I could not move a muscle.

  And now the pyramidal shadow reached my face, and my friendly patch of sky was obscured. I felt needles burrow into my neck, chin, cheeks and forehead. There was a prickle — an unbearable itch — across the surface of my exposed eyes. I longed to look away, to close my eyes; but I could not: it was the most exquisite torture I can imagine!

  Then, with that deep fire penetrating even my eyeballs, my grasp on consciousness slipped mercifully away.

  When next I woke, my emergence had none of the nightmarish quality of my first arousal. I surfaced towards the world through a layer of sunlit dreams: I swam through fragmentary visions of sand, forest and ocean; I tasted again tough, salty bivalves; and I lay with Hilary Bond in warmth and darkness.

  Then, slowly, full awakening came.

  I was lying on some hard surface. My back, which responded with a twinge when I tried to move, was real enough; as were my splayed-out legs, my arms, my tingling fingers, the engine-like whistle of air through my nostrils, and the thrum of blood in my veins. I lay in darkness — utter and complete — but that little fact, which once might have terrified me, now seemed incidental, for I was alive again, surrounded by the familiar mechanical rattle of my own body. I felt an access of relief, pure and intense, and I let out a whoop of joy!

  I sat up. When I laid my hands on the floor I found coarse-grained particles there, as if a layer of sand sat over some harder surface. Though I wore only my shirt, trousers and boots, I felt quite warm. I remained in complete darkness; but the echoes of that foolish holler had returned swiftly to my ears, and I had the sensation that I was in some enclosed space.

  I turned my head this way and that, seeking a window or door; but this was without avail. However I became aware of a heaviness about my head — something was pinching my nose — and when I lifted my hands to investigate, I found a pair of heavy spectacles sitting on my face, the glass integrated with the frame.

  I probed at this clumsy device — and the room was flooded with a brilliant light.

  At first I was dazzled, and I squeezed my eyes shut. I snatched off the spectacles — and found that the light disappeared, leaving me sunk in darkness. And when I donned the spectacles, the brightness returned.

  It did not tax my ingenuity far to understand that the darkness was the reality; and that the light was being furnished for me by the spectacles themselves, which I had inadvertently activated. The spectacles were some equivalent of Nebogipfel’s goggles, which the poor Morlock had lost in the Palaeocene Storm.

  My eyes adjusted to the illumination, and I stood up and inspected myself. I was whole, and, it seemed, hale; I could find no trace on my hands or arms of the action of that diffuse pyramid-creature on my skin. I noticed a series of white traces, though, in the fabric of my jungle-twill shirt and trousers; when I ran my finger along these, I found low, ridged seams, as if clumsy repairs had been effected in my clothes.

  I was in a chamber perhaps twelve feet across and about as high — and it was the most peculiar room I had visited in all my travels through time so far. To picture it, you must begin with a hotel room of the late nineteenth century. But the room was not constructed on the rectangular pattern common in my day; rather, it was a rounded cone, something like the inside of a tent. There was no door, and no furniture of any sort. The floor was covered by an even layer of sand, in which I could see the indentations where I had slept.

  On the walls there was a rather garish paper — a purple, flock concoction — and what looked like window-frames, set about with heavy curtains. But the frames contained not glass, but only panels coated with more of the flock-paper.

  There was no light source in the room. Instead, a steady and diffuse glow permeated the air, like the light of a cloudy day. I was by now convinced, however, that the illumination I saw was some artifact of my spectacles rather than anything physical. The ceiling above me was an ornate affair, decorated with the most remarkable paintings. Here and there in tha
t baroque cascade I could make out fragments of the human form, but so jumbled about and distorted that the design was impossible to make out: it was not grotesque, but instead clumsy and confused — as if the artist had the technical ability of a Michelangelo, but the vision of a retarded child. And so you have it: the elements, I suppose, of a cheap hotel room of my day but transmogrified into this peculiar geometry, like something out of a dream!

  I walked about, and my boots crunched on the coarse sand. I found no seam in the walls, no hint of a door. In one part of the room there was a cubicle, about three feet on a side, made of white porcelain. When I stepped off the sand and onto the porcelain platform, steam hissed, quite unexpectedly, from vents in the walls. I stepped back, startled, and the jets desisted; the lingering steam lapped about my face.

  I found a series of small bowls set on the sand. They were a hand’s-breadth across and had shallow rims, like saucers. Some of the bowls contained water, and others portions of food: simple stuff, fruit and nuts and berries and the like, but nothing I could readily recognize. Finding myself thirsty, I drained a couple of the water-bowls. I found the bowls clumsy to use; their shallow profiles gave them a tendency to dump their contents over my chin, and they were less like cups, I thought, than the dishes one uses to water a dog or cat. I nibbled at a little of the food; the taste of the fruit pieces was bland but acceptable.

  After this my hands and lips were left sticky, and I looked about for a sink or toilet facilities. There were none, of course; and I resorted to rinsing myself with the contents of another of the little water-bowls, and drying my face on a corner of my shirt.

  I probed at the dummy windows, and leaped up, trying to poke at the clumsy ceiling designs, but to no avail; the surface of the walls and floor was as smooth as an eggshell’s but unbreachable. I dug out some of the sand on the floor and found that it penetrated to a depth of nine inches or a foot; under it lay a mosaic of brightly colored fragments, rather after the Roman style — but, like the ceiling, the mosaic depicted no portrait or scene I could discern, but rather a fragmentary jumble of designs.

  I was quite alone, and there was no sound from beyond the walls: no sound in my universe, in fact, save the rustle of my own breathing, the thump of my heart the very noises which I had welcomed back with such vigor, so recently!

  After a time, certain human needs asserted themselves. I resisted these pressures as long as I could, but at last was forced to resort to digging shallow pits in the sand, for the purpose of relieving myself.

  As I covered over the first of these pits I felt the most extraordinary shame. I wondered what the Starmen of this remote 1891 were making of this performance!

  When I tired, I settled myself in the sand, with my back to the wall of the room. At first I kept the light-spectacles on, but I found the illumination too bright to allow me to rest; so I doffed the spectacles, and kept them wrapped around my hand while I slept.

  So began my sojourn in that bizarre cage of a room. As my initial fear subsided, a restless boredom crept over me. It was an imprisonment reminiscent of my time in the Morlocks’ Cage of Light, and I had come away from that without any wish to repeat the experience. I came to feel that anything, even the intrusion of danger, would be preferable than to remain in this dull, seamless prison. My exile in the Palaeocene — fifty million years from the nearest newspaper — had cured me of my old impulse to read, I think; but still, at times I thought I should go mad for lack of someone to talk to.

  The bowls of food and water were filled up each time I slept. I never determined the mechanism by which this was done. I saw no evidence of an extruding machinery like the Morlocks’; but neither did I ever witness the refilling of a bowl by any semblance of attendant. Once, as an experiment, I went to sleep with a bowl buried beneath my body. I awoke to find a soggy sensation under my ribs. When I lifted myself, I found the bowl had filled with water once more, as if by some miraculous process.

  I came to the tentative conclusion that, somehow, a subtle machinery in the bowls themselves was assembling the contents either from the substance of the bowls, or from the material of the air. I thought though I had no desire to investigate! — that my buried waste was broken down by the same discreet mechanisms. It was a bizarre, and not very appetizing, prospect.

  [2]

  Experiments and Reflections

  After three or four days I felt the need to get myself properly clean. As I have said, there was no semblance of toilet facilities here, and I grew dissatisfied with the cat-licks I was able to perform with my bowls of drinking water. I longed for a bath, or, better still, a swim in my Palaeocene Sea.

  It took me some time — you may think me rather dull on this point — before I turned my attention again to that cubicle of porcelain I have described, ignored since my first tentative exploration of the chamber. I approached that cubicle now, and placed one cautious foot onto the porcelain base. Once more, steam spurted from the walls.

  Suddenly I understood. With a surge of enthusiasm I stripped off my boots and garments (I retained my spectacles, though) and stepped into the little cubicle. Steam billowed all around me; the perspiration started from my skin, and moisture gathered over my spectacles. I had expected that the steam would blow out around the room, turning it all into something of a sauna. But the steam confined itself to the cubicle area, no doubt thanks to some arrangement involving differences in air pressure.

  This was my bath-room, after all: it was not kitted out like the facilities of my own day — but why should it have been? My house in the Petersham Road was lost in a different History, after all. I recalled that the Romans, for example, had known nothing of soap or detergents; they had been forced to resort to this sort of poaching to sweat the dirt out of their pores. And the steam cleansing proved quite effective in my case, although, lacking the scrapers the Romans had used, I was forced to use my finger-nails to drag the accumulated muck off my flesh.

  When I stepped away from the sauna, I looked for a way to dry myself off, lacking a towel. I considered, with reluctance, using my clothes; then, with an inspiration, I turned to the sand. I found that the gritty stuff, though coarse against my skin, took away the moisture pretty well.

  My experience with the sauna caused me some self-reflection. How could I have been so narrow of mind that it should take me so long to have deduced the function of so obvious a piece of equipment? There had been many parts of the world in my own time, after all, which had not known the pleasures of modern plumbing and china bath-ware — plenty of districts of London, in fact, if one was to believe the more harrowing tales in the Pall Mall Gazette.

  It was clear that a great deal of effort had been taken, by the unknown Starmen of this Age, to provide me with a room to sustain me. I was in a radically different History now, after all; and perhaps the strangeness of this chamber — the lack of recognizable sanitary facilities, the unusual type of food, and so forth — were not so significant or bizarre as they seemed to me.

  I had been provided with the elements of a hotel room of my own day, but they were mixed up with what seemed to be sanitary arrangements dating from the birth of Christ; and as for the food, those plates of nuts and fruit which I was expected to nibble seemed more suited to one of my remote, fruit-gathering ancestors — say, from forty thousand years before my birth.

  It was a muddle, a melange of fragments from the disparate Ages of Man! But I thought I saw a sort of pattern about it.

  I considered the separation between myself and the inhabitants of this world. Since the founding of First London there had been fifty million years of development — more than a hundred times the evolutionary gap between myself and the Morlock. Over such unimaginable Ages, time is compressed — it is like the squeezing of layers of sedimentary rock by the weight of deposits above — until the interval between myself and Gaius Julius Caesar, or even between myself and the first representatives of genus Homo to walk the earth — which seemed so immense to me, from my perspective —
dwindles to virtually naught.

  Given all that, I thought, my unseen hosts had done a pretty good job at guessing at the conditions which might make me comfortable.

  In any event it appeared that my expectations, even after all my experiences, were still rooted in my own century, and in one small part of the globe! This was a chastening thought — a recognition of my own smallness of spirit — and I gave up some time, reluctantly, to inward contemplation. But I am not by nature a reflective man, and soon I found myself chafing once more at my conditions of restraint. Ungrateful as it might be, I wanted my liberty back! — though I could see no means of obtaining it.

  I think I was in that cage for perhaps a fortnight. When my release came, it was as sudden as it was unexpected.

  I awoke in the dark.

  I sat up, without my spectacles. At first I could not determine what had disturbed me — and then I heard it: a soft sound, a gentle, remote breathing. It was the most subtle of noises — almost inaudible and I knew that, if it had come floating up from the Richmond streets in the small hours of the morning, I should not have been disturbed by it. But here my senses had been heightened in sensitivity by my lengthy isolation: here I had heard no sounds for a fortnight — save for the soft hiss of the steam-bath — not generated by myself. I jammed my glasses onto my face. Light flooded my eyes, and I blinked away tears, impatient to see.

  The glasses showed me a gentle glow, moonlight-pale, seeping into my room. A door was open, in the wall of my cell. It was lozenge-shaped, with a sill perhaps six inches from the floor, and it cut through a fake window frame.

  I got to my feet, pulled on my shirt — for I had become accustomed to sleeping with the shirt as a rough pillow — and stepped towards the door-frame. That soft breathing increased in volume, and — overlaid on it, like the whisper of a brook over a breeze — I heard the liquid gurgle of a voice: an almost-human sound, a voice I recognized instantly!